Opinion

07/30/2015
The Shoreline Unified School District’s board meeting on July 16 was a disappointment. For over a year the subject of ending school trustee health care benefits has been discussed at meetings, sometimes as agenda items and sometimes through public comment. I attend these meetings regularly, more so than some school...

07/30/2015
A number of people are concerned about geo-engineering and contrails. Their concerns are misplaced. Cloud seeding, for purposes of rainmaking, has been going on for generations, especially when there are droughts. There has been no noticeable effect, either bad or good. If the contrails are for cloud seeding, nobody should...

07/16/2015
The other day I woke up to a brilliant sky, the color of which made me feel all was not wrong with the world. Mid-morning, two jets flew high over Tomales Bay, leaving white, fluffy trails that slowly spread into the atmosphere. By late morning, the sky was crisscrossed with...

07/09/2015
Donald Trump, the magnate and businessman, upon launching himself once again as a potential presidential candidate of the Republican party, declared that he would stop the rapists, drug traffickers and criminals coming across the southern border by building an enormous fence, paid for by Mexico. He said Mexican immigrants are...

06/18/2015
I spoke last week at the Marin County Board of Supervisors workshop on the proposal for medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated Marin. A variety of opinions on the proposal, and on medical marijuana in general, were voiced, and a shocking level of naïveté displayed. Apparently, when some hear the words...

06/11/2015
Humans have left their places of origin to live in other places from time immemorial. Though the original nomads demonstrate our proclivity for the process, a sedentary lifestyle has almost come to define humanity. One of our identifying characteristics is to belong to a place, and be part of the...

06/04/2015
How precious our community is. Our hearts are filled with the beauty of the land, yet it’s this beauty that now makes our home a destination spot advertised in The New York Times. Elders will naturally leave, but some are being forced to leave before their time. And of course...

06/04/2015
Taboo! Subtle and not-so-subtle cultural conventions keep us from considering the single most significant cause of ecological devastation: overpopulation. We’re faced with a kind of unconscious conspiracy in which folks tacitly agree not to address the earth’s swollen human population as a critical environmental issue. Even avid conservationists publicly shy...

05/14/2015
I just started a new series of Spanish classes and, as always, I explained to the new students that one of the major differences between our two languages, English and Spanish, lies in the different sounds—simple and combined—that exist between them. There are 23 sounds, or phonemes, in Latin American...